Founder's of Gaming GPU pioneers 3DFX sits down for a chat..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU

The 4 founders of gaming GPU pioneer 3DFX sits down for a chat on the early days of 3D graphics and 3DFX's role. A very rare insight into how 3D Gaming graphics came to be. This company laid the foundation for all the fancy graphics we have today in PCs and consoles. #muchrespect

Interesting stuff if you are graphics fanatic like me. :P

Pretty much all of SW's atm. Heh.

Oh, 3dfx...I remember the glory days. I loved those cards.

Shame they got swallowed by Nvidia.

My first 3dfx card was a PCI Voodoo 2 12mb in 98 and then an AGP Voodoo 3 16mb in 2000. 3DFX was going down drain when Nvidia bought them, 3DFX delayed a few products and with mediocre reviews for others, shrinking sales. then changed CEO's and was laying off employees.

Ha! But how many of them know the origins of the great "Graphics War"? ;)

Tribes and Vampire the masquerade were my first ever 3d accelerated pc games, I think that was such a turning point for me regarding graphics, the colors, the lighting, everything just looked so damn good.

It really sucks going back to the play the old 3dfx titles without a wrapper of some sort, the d3d support is just so lame in comparison.

I would have killed to get a Voodoo 2 12mb in 98. I was salivating when I saw those 3DFX Voodoo 2 ads in PC Gamer. I had to stick to a RIVA 128 which was no where near as powerful as a Voodoo 2 but it played certain games well at 640x480 even though the textures were off. I think around in 99 when nVidia released the GeForce 256 was when 3DFX started to fall behind. And when GeForce 2 hit in 2000, that was kind of the nail in the coffin for 3DFX. They lost like $100 million that summer quarter compared to like 80% jump in revenue compared to similar time period in summer of 98. Scott Sellers, one of the founders were talking about how 3DFX focused on high end, high performance gaming when they started out where as nVidia (along with ATI) were focused on lower performance parts targeted to the OEM market and how nVidia started to increase their performance year over year and by 2000 they had caught up to and eclipsed 3DFX. I remember when the 3DFX Voodoo 5 5500 hit the market in 2000, their performance was below the GeForce 2, only thing they had over nVidia was FSAA, which at the time kind of made the games look blurry. Plus playing games like Quake 3 with 4X FXAA at 1024x768 resolution made it run slow, which kind of made the feature useless.

They kind of lamented the fact that they never were really able to crack the OEM market like nVidia was able to. Also, the founders said buying STB to make their own graphics also helped destroy the company (one of the founders were actually against it), the new CEO and the newer executives that were running the company went ahead with it anyway, I don't think they had a clue what they were doing. Instead of selling 3DFX parts to Diamond, Creative and other 3rd party Add-in board partners they were now competing with them. I would have loved to see how the 3DFX Voodoo 5 6000 performed. With whatever remaining engineering samples that were made of the Voodoo 5 6000, some benchmarks have it easily trashing the GeForce 3. But it was a case of too little too late.

Anyways, here is a nice little magazine add of 3DFX from 97/98.

3DFX may be dead but they will never be forgotten.

i will never forget them. voodoo 3 3000 was incredibly good value, lasted me a long time.

At one point many years back I upgraded to a (if I remember correctly) a Voodoo2, my first video card upgrade ever.

The founding fathers. =o

i thought playstation was the founder

Trolling skills : -4/10

I thought it was FreedomFreeLife

Very long interview. I believe my first 3D GPU was a Voodoo 2, so I'm going to have to watch it.

It really brings back the memories, had a voodoo banshee 16 mb back in 1998, not quite as fast as the voodoo 2 but it was cheaper and it handled 2d as well so no other graphics card was needed. I especially remember half life looking amazing back then.

My first 3d card was a matrox something but I did later get a 4mb voodoo1 then a 12mb voodoo2 also a riva 128.

My friend bought a 3dfx tv tuner card a best buy right as they were going under and inside it's brand new packing was no video card but packs of trading cards lol

LOL. How in the world did that happen? Hope he got a return. It would have p***** me off if something like that happend to me.

Nah..Playstation didn't have 3D accelerated chip. The era of 3D accelerated graphics really took off with Dreamcast where it had PowerVR graphics. Interesting, thing as alluded, in the interview, it was originally supposed to have a 3DFX Voodoo graphics chip inside it but Sega decided to go with the PowerVR chip. That console deal might have saved 3DFX..maybe even Sega as Voodoo > PowerVR graphics.

@Xtasy26: lol yea customer service at best buy didn't really know how to handle it but gave him his cash back. It was weirdest thing I ever seen I wouldn't of believed it if I didn't see him open it. Inside was a few packs of desert storm trading cards.

I don't even...

3Dfx Voodoo card was my first GPU... so many great memories :)

Know how to troll

Well playstation was build for 3D, that and the cd-rom was the reason of the huge success of the playstation. Allthough the 3d was more of the equivalent of software rendering in a computer, and even then, with a lot less capabilities.

So you're right about the 3d accelerated chip, but dreamcast had nothing to do with the era of 3d accelerated chips. The voodoo 2 released in february 1998, the dreamcast in november 1998 in japan, and in q4 1999 it was released in the rest of the world.

Allthough the powervr chip in the dreamcast was better than the voodoo 2, the voodoo 2 in sli wiped the floor with it. The voodoo 2 in sli were so strong that it even outperformed the riva tnt2 and the voodoo 3, who were both stronger than the powervr chip as well and were released in late 1998. When the dreamcast released in the rest of the world in late 1999, nvidia already released the geforce 256 (the first named geforce card). While it wasn't that much better than the voodoo2 in sli, it had direct3d support for directx 7 which also support hardware t&l , which could offload tasks from the cpu and do it much more efficient.

In early 2000 nvidia released the geforce 2 and that was a done deal for everybody else in the gpu market. All competitors were nowhere near this kind of gpu power and this was big thing in the late nineties, unlike now. Games made use of the best hardware available. As for consoles the playstation 2 released that year which outperformed the dreamcast by a mile. The dreamcast wasn't able to conquer enough market by that time and since this was sega's second fail (the saturn flopped as well) it was a done deal for sega. (the 3 failed hardware addons for the genesis didn't help much either)

3dfx never catched up . A console deal with 3dfx would not have saved the dreamcast because the cost would have been to high to have increased performance. They would have needed a faster cpu, a better power supply, and two cards in sli would have upped the price as well. The voodoo3 was hardly any better than the powervr chip and only released in 1999 when the dreamcast was already a year out in japan. Not only that, sega had it's own hardware r&d division, the powervr chip was used in arcade systems as well. A decision to make a system that was like a pc would probably not have worked due to hardware costs and operating system costs.

Allthough had sega released the dreamcast worldwide in 1998 then maybe they would still exist in the console department, but that's all a lot of speculation. They lost a lot of customers to the playstation in the nineties and nintendo was still there too. Both playstation and nintendo had made the jump to 3d with the ps1 and the n64 while the saturn was still a 2d system. They also lost a lot of customers too with their pretty much useless addons for the genesis like the 32x and the sega cd.

And even then, I don't think sega would be able to compete with the mastodonts that are sony and microsoft. I really hope that nintendo get's his act together though and makes a console that is competitive again because as of now, the gaming market looks a bit bland but there is hope and that is because of virtual reality tech.

Oh the joy of going of some shitty 2mb gpu with next to nothing 3d capabilities to Voodoo 2 and playing Unreal was a revelation

My first GPU was a GeForce2 256

If you want to know how good the voodoo 2 sli was then look at this guy playing Call of Duty 2 with them.....a game that was released on the 360!

Great time for me. I started out with the original Diamond Monster 3D right at the very end of 1996 when I added it to my gaming PC then: P200MMX/Matrox MIllenium.

In March 1998, I bought two STB Blackmagic Voodoo 2's and paired them with my then gaming PC: P2-266/STB Velocity Riva 128. I kept my Voodoo 2's until 2002.

I'm not sure what happened to the bundled games of my Voodoo 2's. But, I still have many of the games from the original Monster 3D.

Diamond Monster 3D, circa 2005, among other cards (original Radeon, SCSI card, 10BaseT NIC, Hauppage WinTV PCI):

Yes you are right. I should have mentioned that the Dreamcast was the first console to truly have a "3D Accelerated" graphics chip. It was supposed to have the 3DFX Voodoo chip as alluded to in the interview but for some reason they decided to go with a PowerVR graphics chip.

And you are pretty much on with the rest of the stuff. SLI was truly an innovation, 3DFX was able to trounce with ATI and nVidia as the "fastest graphics setup" despite ATI and nVidia having a good single GPUs because two Voodoo 2's would have trounced anything that ATI and nVidia had up until I believe the GeForce 256/2 or the when the Rage Fury MAXX/ Radeon showed up.

With respect to Dreamcast, I agree, they should have released it in 1998 in North America and worldwide. Releasing it a year later was a boneheaded move by Sega. But like you I have come to the conclusion that I don't know if they would have survived the next generation of console wars regardless. Because once Microsoft entered the console market I don't think there would have been room for four players and Microsoft was willing to lose money as they had a lot of cash and their other businesses would have made up for the loss of Xbox 1, something that Sega couldn't afford to do. I believe Microsoft lost like 4 billion on the first generation Xbox. Things really have changed much in the last 12 years as Microsoft I believe is still losing money in their console business. Shame really as the Dreamcast had great games like Soul Calibur and Crazy Taxi and others that I forget.

Lol yeah you could put it that way! :)

Revelation indeed. Unreal was GORGEOUS on a Voodoo 2 or in later GPU's. The environments, the waterfalls, it was stunning. Easily the Crysis of 1998. Even the intro where the camera flys over the castle had a wow factor.

Voodoo 2 IMO was one of the greatest GPU's of all time. Hardly any GPU in the history of GPU's elevated graphics power like the Voodoo 2 and with SLI it essentially doubled the performance. nVidia and ATI as well the rest of the competition couldn't touch 3DFX at the time.

@jun_aka_pekto said:

Great time for me. I started out with the original Diamond Monster 3D right at the very end of 1996 when I added it to my gaming PC then: P200MMX/Matrox MIllenium.

In March 1998, I bought two STB Blackmagic Voodoo 2's and paired them with my then gaming PC: P2-266/STB Velocity Riva 128. I kept my Voodoo 2's until 2002.

I'm not sure what happened to the bundled games of my Voodoo 2's. But, I still have many of the games from the original Monster 3D.

Diamond Monster 3D, circa 2005, among other cards (original Radeon, SCSI card, 10BaseT NIC, Hauppage WinTV PCI):

I am so jelly. I ran accross a STB Black magic Voodoo 2 couple of years ago on a discontinued PC 7 years ago. Wish I had asked to see if I could have the Voodoo 2 just as a collectors item. :( It's nice that you have kept some old hardware. Oh, and the RIVA 128 that I gamed on was the same STB Velocity one that you had. I still have my GeForce 4 MX somewhere.

I wonder why they never made a Descent 4? The Descent series was awesome. They could use a new Descent with it's 360 degree of freedom these days when we have a market over saturated with same old crap COD type of games.

We should get a new kick starter going!

My 1st real GPU was the voodoo 3000 in 2000. I think at the point it was a budget GPU, but it made a massive difference in my games, especially Unreal Tournament, and NFSHP. It really was a night and day difference.